One week challenge - Cantonese (Language Learning Log) Language Learning Forum

One week challenge - Cantonese
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Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log

Ichiro
Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 6152 days ago
111 posts - 152 votes

Speaks: English*, Japanese, French
Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Korean, Malay

Message 1 of 1

03 February 2008 at 10:11am | IP Logged

Well, I've done a week on Cantonese, and I have to admit I can't say it was fully successful. I've got a few phrases down pat, but not much flexibility with them, and they certainly don't spring readily to mind. I tested them on a couple of Cantonese-speaking work colleagues, and was dutifully congratulated on my pronunciation; but there's no doubt it was the congratulation of politeness, not the congratulation of achievement. So a bit disappointing for a week's effort.

My tools were Pimsleur and FSI, and this fantastic site which unzum kindly provided -

unzum wrote:

If you want some revision sheets to print out check out Cantonese sheik.

Good luck!

Thanks unzum.

I think the tool selection is why I didn't get more out of it. FSI and Pimsleur are both good fine things, but Pimsleur is too slow to deliver its benefit over a week and FSI is too massive.

I should have been a bit more intelligent and creative and seen if I could craft my own set of useful phrases and responses up front, a week's worth of useful stuff, and learn that. Instead I tried to cram in a bunch of material which has a delivery horizon of way more than a week

So what have I got out of it?

DerDrache wrote:

What's the point? You won't make significant progress in just a week [...] I could understand the point of a 6-week challenge, but one-week...even if you did manage to learn "a lot", you'd forget it very quickly after you stopped.

Well, I like Cantonese a lot, it turns out. Even in these early stages it's constructive to compare with Mandarin to see the common points of the Chinese languages. And I really like the sounds. To my ear, they're just weird and angry, like Korean. So I hope to go a bit further with this one.

I had intended to see if I could do just a quick 'in-and-out' that would give me some phrases to flash around. Now, I've not really achieved that, but I do have a bit of a base in the sounds and the language feel that perhaps I can develop over a longer horizon.

And perhaps most usefully, the exercise has given me an idea of how I might mount a one-week challenge in the future, no experience wasted. I may be off on a mini-break to Cambodia in a month. Perhaps I'll spend a week learning to count and order Beer. A tang of Khmer! Who wouldn't want a bit of that?

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